As I told you a few weeks ago, the weeds took over while I was out of town. I worked, like a crazy person, to get them under control as soon as I got back to town. Let me recap.

This is what the east end of the Front Garden Bed looked like at the end of February.

This is what it looked like when I left town at the end of May.

This is what it looked liked after I got back to town and started seriously attacking the overgrowth.

THEN, I went out one morning with my coffee to walk around the yard and the neighbor started waving at me and yelling, “There’s a dead dog in your yard!”

I walked over to look where she was pointing and went into shock. It wasn’t a stray that got sick and wandered into my yard and died. It was a young dog that had clearly been killed, then wrapped in plastic, put on a piece of plywood, covered with branches, then dumped in my yard.

I called the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office. A deputy arrived minutes later. He took one look at me as we stood next to the dead dog and suggested that we go somewhere else to talk. I was shaking and irrational. He called Animal Services and within the half hour a very nice man was there to handle removing the dog and determining what had caused its death. The deputy filed a complaint and gave me a victim’s rights brochure with the case number on it. I began to realize that this was something that had been done to me as well as to the dog. I could barely breathe.

I tried very hard to ignore the ritualistic aspects of the occurrence. For the first few nights, I had nightmares about the horse head in the bed scene from The Godfather. Then I began to have nightmares about scenes from Rosemary’s Baby.

Before I left town in May I had filed a complaint about being attacked by a pit bull that was allowed to run loose in the neighborhood. It’s been an ongoing problem.

The dog was still running loose the day I left town. As angry as I was that Animal Services continued to fail to stop these vicious animals from running loose in the neighborhood, I was stunned that someone would kill a dog and dump it in someone’s yard to make the point that they could treat animals any way they wanted to and nobody could stop them from doing it.

It was a week before I could make myself go back into the yard next door. By then the weeds had had a field day. Now I started having nightmares of Code Enforcement having me arrested for having too many weeds in my yard. I got an email from New York that said “Come home now. Get out of there!” I emailed back that I was okay. The reply that came said, “Get on a plane and get out of there now!”